Nymphomaniac: Vol. II

Nymphomaniac: Vol. II (2013) continues directly from the first part and is the second half of one film. Joe carries on telling her story. The first part was youth and discovery; this is the cost. She loses the capacity to feel and goes to increasingly extreme lengths to get it back. At one point there is a child, and the film does not come back from there. The real subject of the second part is not addiction but judgement. Joe describes herself and Seligman keeps producing excuses, explaining every behaviour through a comparison with literature, music or nature. The last scene tests that sympathetic listener too. The actors' bodies were not used for the explicit scenes. The faces belong to the cast, the bodies to adult performers, and the two were combined digitally. Von Trier had cut a far longer version. The released version was shortened by the producers and he did not accept it as his own; a director's cut was shown separately later. Stellan Skarsgård, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Willem Dafoe and Jamie Bell are in the cast. The chapters are numbered again and each opens with an analogy. There is less of the first part's humour; the register is noticeably darker. It runs 123 minutes in the shortened version. Good for: von Trier, art cinema, and extreme narrative. Less good for: the sexual content and violence are very explicit, and it makes no sense without the first part.